The present invention relates to a low cost, flight weight scram jet engine and to a heat exchanger panel used in the engine.
Unlike conventional jet engines which have relatively cool fan or compressor air available to cool the engine, a scram jet engine has no such components. Due to its high speed of Mach 5+, any external air brought onboard the engine is too hot to be used as a coolant. To deal with this problem, heat sink scram jet engines use solid copper or steel walls to absorb heat, but are impractical for sustained flight due to their high weight and limited run duration. An alternate solution is to use the engine""s fuel as a heat sink. However, despite this solution, there still remains a need for a scram jet engine which better equipped to handle the high heat loads and the associated thermal strains.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a low cost, flight weight scram jet engine.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a scram jet engine as above which is capable of handling high heat loads.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide an improved heat exchanger panel to be used in a scram jet engine.
The foregoing objects are attained by the scram jet engine design of the present invention.
In accordance with the present invention, a scram jet engine broadly comprises an upper boundary wall, a lower boundary wall, and a plurality of side walls defining an inner air flowpath. The upper boundary wall, the lower boundary wall, and the side walls are formed by a plurality of heat exchanger panels. Each heat exchanger panel comprises a plurality of structural panels, each having a plurality of cooling passages, joined together.
Other details of the scram jet engine design of the present invention, as well as other objects and advantages attendant thereto, are set forth in the following detailed description and the accompanying drawings.